Evaluation results

It is obvious that not all the pitfalls are equally important; their impact in the ontology will depend on multiple factors. For this reason, each pitfall has an importance level attached indicating how important it is. We have identified three levels:

Critical

It is crucial to correct the pitfall. Otherwise, it could affect the ontology consistency, reasoning, applicability, etc.

Important

Though not critical for ontology function, it is important to correct this type of pitfall.

Minor

It is not really a problem, but by correcting it we will make the ontology nicer.

The owl:Ontology tag aims at gathering metadata about a given ontology as version information, creation date, etc. It is also used to declare the inclusion of other ontologies. Not declaring this tag is consider as a bad practice for owl ontologies as it is a symptom of not providing useful metadata as proposed in LDV2. An example of this pitfall (at 29th June, 2012) could be found at the "Creative Commons Rights Expression Language (cc)" ontology, which URI is http://creativecommons.org/ns, that does not have any owl:Ontology declaration in its RDF file even though there are other OWL elements used as, for example, owl:equivalentProperty.

*This pitfall applies to the ontology in general instead of specific elements

In the case of not having defined the ontology URI nor the xml:base namespace, the ontology namespace is matched to the file location. This situation is not desirable as the location of a file might change while the ontology should remain stable as proposed in LDV1. An example of this pitfall (at 29th June, 2012) could be found at the "Basic Access Control ontology (acl)" with URI http://www.w3.org/ns/auth/acl has no owl:Ontology tag nor xml:base def-inition.

*This pitfall applies to the ontology in general instead of specific elements

[5] Archer, P., Goedertier, S., and Loutas, N. D7.1.3 – Study on persistent URIs, with identification of best practices and recommendations on the topic for the MSs and the EC. Deliverable. December 17, 2012.